Patrick Barry, M.D.

"He Knows Knees"

Convenient office locations throughout New York & Florida

Call Us Today: 1-800-359-5633

Specializing in Non-Surgical Solutions for Problem Knees

4U-Tampa Tribune: Forever Fit

by Patty Kim

Need Surgery? Maybe.

Mess with your knee, the biggest and heaviest joint, and you can forget jumping, running, playing with the kids and walking. It’s debilitating and can force many into surgery, which doesn’t always work.

Unless you’re visiting orthopedic surgeon Patrick J. Barry.

For the past two years of his 40-year practice, he has been helping patients in pain with a simple manipulation of the knee. Instead of using a scalpel, Barry uses his hands to realign the kneecap. It takes just minutes, and patients often don’t realize what he has done.

Barry is based in South Florida, with two offices near Fort Lauderdale and Miami. But a TV report on his new technique has opened the door to patients in the Tampa Bay area.

Recently Barry and his team have been bringing his practice to Tampa once a month. He sets up at the Grand Hyatt, where a parlor-turned-waiting room connects two bedrooms for examinations. The team brings massage tables and disposable equipment.

It was good enough for Colleen Hildebrand of Gulfport. After she fell off a sea wall and crushed her right knee three years ago, she had surgery. It didn’t help the pain, which meant no more tennis, running or yoga.

The 51-year-old saw Barry in January. The doctor went to work repositioning her knee. It involves using intense pressure to free up scar tissue and maneuver the kneecap to its proper position.

“Once you get the knee done, the leg works right and the back pain goes away,” Barry says of the domino effect.

It’s so intense that Barry prepares himself with Band-Aids and Diesel shoes. Band-Aids cover his thumbs to keep the skin from pulling away from his nails as he bears down. Diesels — he has a closet full of earth-tones, which nearly pass for dress shoes — give him the traction he needs to “get my weight into it,” he says.

The first manipulation was painful, Hildebrand recalls, but she noticed a difference in the way she felt immediately. “I couldn’t jog down the hall four months ago, and now I’m running better than when I walked in five minutes ago,” she says after a follow-up visit in March.

Louise Richards, 72, used to walk five miles every morning and one at night — before she tore the meniscus in both knees.

After emergency surgery, she was walking with crutches and then a cane.

After a few visits to Barry, Richards is walking nearly two miles a day on her own. She’s not sure whether she or her husband is happier. Richards is such a believer in Barry that she has gotten three EHenton neighbors to schedule appointments.

“I wish other people could see this. I don’t know what it is, but I just wish other doctors could do this,” Richards says. “It’s the greatest thing in the world to be active again.”
After surgeries on both knees from a torn meniscus, hydrocortisone shots and pain for 10 years, it didn’t take much for Joan Smith of Bradenton to pay Barry a visit. The 53-year-old was told she needs total knee replacements.

She was confined to her bed or a rocking chair with a heating pad. She couldn’t clean the house. She couldn’t stand for more than 10 minutes.

Now she can clean five rooms, pausing to sit only once. And husband Melvin says he notices a difference in the way she walks. “She used to walk like a duck.”

Seth Gasser of the Florida Orthopedic Institute has several patients who have visited Barry. Some have been helped, some have not, says Gasser, who has been practicing for 15 years and is the team physician for the University of South Florida, University of Tampa, Saint Leo University and Plant High.

Because Barry has not published any studies on his knee manipulation technique, Gasser says, “I honestly don’t have enough knowledge of what and how he does what he does to tell you what I think…. There’s not enough information to make an educated assessment of it,”

Barry, who has been specializing in knees for 25 years, is quickly Grafting a new practice. He used to perform knee surgeries — nearly 11,000 — every Tuesday. Now it’s once a month. Barry has treated about 700 patients with his knee manipulations.

He’s out to help people who have had surgeries that didn’t work; those in persistent pain and don’t know why; patients who have been told they need surgery but don’t want it; runners in pain. He has even helped 10 patients with total knee replacements.

So how does Barry measure his success? By the number of happy patients.

“I help 95 out of 100 people feel better, whether it’s the woman who can now run 600 yards or helping the woman who couldn’t walk before walk again. And I’ve not had any runners who haven’t returned to marathons.”